


somewhere to begin

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Divergent, F/M, Fluff, Romance while fleeing for your lives, casual conversation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 19:04:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15371289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: Shaw didn't think that in a cave, running for their lives from a maniac would be where Raven and him get to have their first real conversation, but hey, he isn't complaining.





	somewhere to begin

The gentle flicker of firelight on cave walls is soundtracked by quiet murmurs of conversation and light popping of wood. None of the people talking would risk any more noise than that, there’s no chance of any sort of exclamation or raucous argument such as Shaw is used to hearing. Everyone gathered here, secreted away in a vast network of caves and tunnels, knows how much danger they’re in right now. They glance around constantly, nervous and confident that at any moment McCreary and his thugs will come racing in to slaughter them all.

They’re right to be nervous, and Shaw knows it better than any of them. If they’re lucky, McCreary will be so consumed by rage when he finds them that he will just kill all of them. The unlucky will survive that, and he’ll keep them around, to torture and kill as the whims take him. Shaw keeps that knowledge to himself, though, and lets the others fear only death. 

The risk of all that, of course, would be mitigated by him leaving. Shaw knows that his staying with the group only puts them more in harm's way, and he really ought to make his escape as soon as possible. Not for his sake, because whatever waits for him back in camp isn’t going to be pretty, but for the sake of all the refugees - well, one in particular, but everyone would benefit just the same. That’s why he’s kept himself separate, simply observing from his position in a dark corner of the main cave. His presence is dangerous, and he’s not the only one who knows it.

From across the room, Shaw can feel Echo’s eyes burn into him with naked intent. She hasn’t killed him yet, but he knows that she would, if she were given just a moment without someone nearby to stop her. Sometimes, when Shaw remembers some of the more horrific things McCreary has done in the name of extracting information, he thinks he ought to let her. It would be the correct thing to do, right? But if he’s being entirely honest, Shaw doesn’t want to die.

He makes very sure not to react to Echo’s attention, avoiding eye contact and trying not to tense up. It’s hard, especially without something to distract himself, only able to study one of the small fires in an effort to prevent himself from going over there and demanding she either kill him or move on already. Shaw’s pretty used to death threats after all his time with criminals, and he has to remind himself that Echo doesn’t have any real reason to restrain herself. The Eligius criminals couldn’t kill him, for the very same reason that she wants to.

Shaw holds out for a remarkably long time before the constant observance gets to him, and he pushes himself suddenly to his feet. Several people around him startle, so caught up in their own worry that the slightest change in their environment is a cause for alarm. Screw this, though. Screw sitting there as Echo fantasizes about his death, isolating himself in an effort to… what? He knows he’s not going to leave, he would have done so already if he were seriously inclined. 

Shaw makes his way very intentionally past Echo, over to where Raven and Emori are seated, tinkering with some mechanical thing. Making weapons, he’s pretty sure he can deduce that much from the snippets of their conversation he picks up on. But the way they talk is that of the self-taught; he has no doubt that to themselves and each other they make sense, but the amount of half finished sentences leaves Shaw entirely unable to fully understand what they’re doing. 

Emori notices his approach first and nudges Raven’s knee with her own, leaning over to whisper something as Raven looks up at him. Whatever it was startles a smile and a half-laugh from Raven, which Shaw can’t help but smile in response to. There’s something about her that makes it impossible for him to hold his composure, especially when they’re not actively in danger, and her smile is brighter than the campfires littered around them. 

As Shaw reaches them, Emori stands and passes by him, leaving him alone with Raven with no comment other than a conspiratorial wink. He nods at her as she leaves; Shaw likes her, at least as well as he can given their brief interactions. He likes her even more now, though, for giving him time alone with Raven.

“Shaw,” Raven greets him warmly, still seated amidst a pile of scrap metal, and Shaw is tempted to take a seat right next to her. But the hair on the back of his neck stands, and he glances over his shoulder to see Echo still watching him.

“Is there somewhere more private we could go?” Shaw asks, thinking only of getting away from the obsessive assassin. Raven perks up and starts to push herself to her feet immediately, taking Shaw’s hand when he offers it to her for assistance.

“Yeah, let’s just-” Raven cuts off and looks around the central cave for a moment before spying Emori again, gesturing with her chin. “Come on.”

Shaw is more than happy to follow her as she walks over and makes a vague excuse, saying that they’re going to go see if there’s any other ways into the cave system. Not that there’s any chance of that, of course, these caves were all well explored and mapped as soon as they took up base here. But it lets someone know where they are, and gives them a reason for Shaw to follow behind Raven, picking up a torch as they cut out of the main cave into one of the tunnels branching off of it. 

Until they step finally out of sight, Shaw swears he can feel Echo watching him, and he has no reason to doubt that feeling at this point. He sighs with relief as the light of the main cave fades, leaving him alone with Raven and their single torch.

“She really wants to kill me, huh?” Shaw thinks out loud, and Raven looks over her shoulder at him with her eyebrow raised.

“Echo?” At Shaw’s nod, Raven shrugs a shoulder in an awkward gesture. “It’s a little more complicated than that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she does and you should never be alone with her, but it’s not anything personal.”

“Gonna be honest, it’s hard not to take that personally,” Shaw jokes, and Raven gives him a half smile for his efforts.

“Yeah, I get that, but it’s- here.” Raven kicks a few rocks and holds her hand out, reaching towards the torch that Shaw gives up without question. She plants it in between a few rocks, and then sits on a natural sort of chair made by the rock wall, stretching her leg out in front of her with a sigh of relief. She looks up at him expectantly and pats the rock ledge next to her when Shaw doesn’t seat himself right away. 

“As I was saying, it really isn’t personal.” Raven picks her train of thought back up, looking at the rocks on the other side of the tunnel as Shaw indulges himself in turning to look at her. “How much do you know of her world? In between yours and now, I mean.”

Shaw tries to recall all that he knows and comes up relatively short. Kane’s told Diyoza some of it, Clarke gave them a brief history, but he himself doesn’t know a lot of details. “Some of it. Nukes wiped out most of the planet, people formed tribes or something in the wake of it.”

“Kru,” Raven corrects him. “And while you’re not wrong, there’s a lot more than that. For Echo, she was raised from infancy to be a spy and an assassin. All she ever knew was serving her King and her people. Some of the stuff she’s told us- Well, it’s not pretty. She did everything she could for them, and then she was cast out, and that’s where we came in. We picked her up right before the world ended again, and we’ve tried to help her grow and figure out who she is beyond what she was made to be. And she has, but-”

Raven frowns for a second, gathering her thoughts, “She thinks you’re a threat to us. And she’ll do anything to keep us safe. So, while she does want to kill you, it’s not because she doesn’t like you or thinks you deserve to die. It’s the best way she knows to keep us safe. When you grow up and all you know is killing and death, it’s hard to think of any other way.”

“I get it,” Shaw admits, “I definitely understand wanting to keep you safe. It would be nice if I didn’t have to die for it, though.”

Raven laughs lightly, “Yeah, that would be nice. Stick by me, and you’ll be safe. The one thing she’s more afraid of than us getting hurt, is disappointing us and getting cast out again.”

“That’s-” Shaw thinks about it, about what kind of person Echo must be and what she must have gone through that she would let a known threat live just to avoid being left alone, and he can’t deny it touches him. “That’s really sad.”

Raven, somewhat to his surprise, simply shrugs. He wonders at that, if she genuinely doesn’t think that’s sad, or if she’s experienced so much else that it seems like nothing in comparison. He realizes, not for the first time, that he doesn’t know that much about Raven. She had a rough childhood that he understands a little too well, but surely in between then and now there must have been something other than tragedy.

“I guess I was the one who made it not a casual conversation this time, huh?” Shaw attempts to lift the mood and change the subject, and Raven turns her head to grin at him.

“Well now we’re both culprits of that, I guess.” Raven stretches her arms above her head with a small grunt and drops them to her leg, idly massaging it. “Honestly I don’t even know what a casual conversation would be at this point.”

Shaw wants to ask about her leg, but he knows that’s not going to be less tragic. He wants to know everything about her, the good and the bad, but now isn’t the time for that. They need a distraction from the awfulness of the world, not a reminder.

“Well, you could tell me about what it was like back on the Ark, maybe. What you did before you had to save to world all the time.” Shaw bumps her shoulder with his in a playful move. She doesn’t shrug off the contact, and to his delight, she even leans against him a litte.

“That seems like so long ago,” Raven chuckles, leaning into him further. Shaw barely controls the urge to put his arm around her and hold her to his chest. One day, maybe, but they’ve barely talked beyond life or death yet. “I was a Zero G mechanic. Youngest in 52 years.”

Shaw whistles, low and impressed, “Damn, I knew you were smart, but…”

“It’s what I’m good at. Fixing things, making something work with some electrical tape and a prayer. I mean, hell, I built most of the things we were using down here before Praimfiya, or at least drew up the plans for them.” Raven speaks plainly, not bragging, even though Shaw wouldn’t blame her for it. He’s gone up against her in a battle of wits and come out the poorer. “I guess that’s when I’m happiest, when I get to take a mess or something broken, and then I get to make it work.”

“So when did you get into coding?” Shaw asks, remembering her locking him out of his own ship. Not that a Zero G mechanic couldn’t learn how to hack, but he doubts that it was in her curriculum.

“I picked up bits and pieces that we needed to know on the Ark, but most of that was ALIE. She was a bitch and a half, but there were upsides to it.” Raven says, nonchalant.

Shaw racks his brain for a moment, but comes up dry. If Clarke or Kane had told them about ALIE, he either wasn’t privy to it, or had somehow forgotten it in with everything else. Admittedly, it had been an eventful hundred years, and he hadn’t had much time to study his recent history. 

“Who was ALIE, again?” Shaw asks, and Raven hums pensively for a brief moment.

“She was an AI. Ran the City of Light, a virtual network in which everyone was… ‘perfect’.” She makes the air quotes around the word with her fingers. “Just put this chip in your body, and she’d take you there. No pain, no hate, no suffering. And no free will. She used me to further her plans, and I became one with her mainframe and coding. I could learn it all, it was just as easy as breathing. Even after Clarke and Bellamy saved me, I retained a lot of it. That almost killed me, though.”

Raven snorts at that, as if the concept of her almost dying is funny, and Shaw frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Well, they fried the chip in me with an EMP, and it left some nasty gunk in my brain. I started having hallucinations and seizures. Don’t worry, though, I’m better now.” Raven pats Shaw’s leg, to comfort him even though she’s the one who had such a horrifying thing happen to her, nevermind all the implications that Shaw actively decides not to pursue in that moment with being wired into an AI.

“That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you just get better from,” Shaw insists, concerned despite Raven’s flippant tone and effort at comfort. She’s at the same time awe inspiring and concerning; that she could treat death so lightly, and also that she clearly is far too well acquainted with the matter.

“Well, not exactly. I figured out a way to fix it right before Praimfiya. It was risky, but if I didn’t try, I was definitely going to die. I figured that lowering my heart rate and brain activity to near death levels in an ice bath and then kick starting my system back into action would work, and it did. Hard reset,” Raven explains, in the same tone of voice she’d used to describe building tech for her people.

“So basically, you tried ‘turning it off and turning it back on again’?” Shaw asks, shocked that she had managed to come up with that solution, and doubly so that it had worked and not just killed her outright.

“Yeah, basically. It almost didn’t matter in the end, though.”

“How so?” Shaw prompts, and Raven shrugs, her shoulder pressing into his arm.

“I was alone in the lab, and like I said, impending death wave. I thought I was going to die there, even after everything I went through to live, just because no one would come get me.” Raven seems a little sad at that, but in a casual way, as if over the loss of a nice jacket, not her own life. 

“Wait, you hard reset your entire body, basically dying and coming back to life, and you were alone during that?” Shaw doesn't even try to hide the baffled surprise in his voice. It was terrifying enough to imagine going through that, but alone? That means she must have had to restart her own heart, and after coming back from death, she would have had no one there to hold her and tell her it’s okay.

No wonder Raven is so flippant about dying.

“Well, n-” Raven cuts off whatever she was going to say with a sad little frown and a far away look, before shaking her head slightly. “Yeah, I was alone. But it’s fine, really Shaw, I’m okay.”

“No, Raven, it’s not okay. You’re fine now, I get that, but,” Shaw doesn’t even hesitate before taking Raven’s hand in his, “You shouldn’t have had to go through that alone. You shouldn’t have needed to die.”

“We’re all alone in the end, Shaw.” Raven sighs, but she doesn’t pull away from him. With her free hand, she starts tracing the tendons on the back of Shaw’s hand, and for all the sombre mood, he can’t help the happy fluttering of his heart. “And we certainly all die.”

“No, I don’t accept that.” Shaw shakes his head, and Raven looks up at him, her brow furrowed in a quizzical expression. “We all die - hell, right now we might die at any minute - but we don’t have to be alone. _You_ don’t have to be alone.”

“What, are you going to be with me every second from now until I die?” Raven asks, a dark sort of humour turning up the corners of her mouth, and Shaw gives her a small smile in return.

“Maybe. I’ll do my best.”

Raven looks away from him at that, towards the far wall of the tunnel, but she doesn’t pull away. He wonders, sometimes, if maybe he’s coming on a bit too strong, but nothing he’s done so far seems to have scared her off. He can’t really imagine Raven being scared of anything, let alone him and his awkward, century-out-of-date courtship. So Shaw lets the silence grow, until eventually Raven breaks it.

“Do you like me?” She asks, not quiet and shy, gaze diverted to their joined hands, her fingers never pausing in tracing lines on the back of his hand.

“I thought I was pretty obvious about it.” Shaw laughs, a little self-conscious, but continues with total sincerity, “Yes, I like you.”

Raven’s hands still, and Shaw wonders for a moment if he’d done something wrong. He had thought their flirting was mutual, but then again, he's more than a little but out of practice with the whole deal. Plus, Raven's from an entirely different time and culture than him, it's entirely possible he'd been misreading everything.

“Then why haven't you made a move on me?” Ravena asks, and Shaw’s heart starts beating again as relief floods through him. Raven looks up at him, something close to accusation but much more vulnerable in her gaze. “You haven't even tried to kiss me.”

“Somehow it just didn’t seem right. You know, you were our prisoner, and then I was all beat up and- Well, the moment hasn’t been right. Running for our lives and being at war isn’t the most romantic, you know?”

“Romantic, huh?” Raven scoffs lightly and shakes her head, “Shaw, I was raised in space on strict rations under a totalitarian government, and then I came to Earth and the world has been ending in one way or another ever since. I can’t say romance has ever been high on my list of priorities, if that’s what’s holding you back.”

Shaw shrugs a little and leans forward slightly, as if conspiring about some secret with Raven. “Well, I happen to come from a different time, and believe me when I say that if there’s anyone in the world who’s ever been deserving of romance, it’s you, Raven Reyes.” Shaw savours the taste of her name on his tongue and his heart skips a beat at the slight flush that darkens her cheeks. If only they could have met before, how he would love to just take her away on his Harley and shoot the shit with her for hours. Maybe someday, they can do something like that. Shaw clears his throat and continues with a smile, “And I’d like to be the one to give you that, if you let me.”

Shaw has never seen Raven at a loss for words, but in this moment she seems to stumble for them, and Shaw’s heart swells at it. It’s incredible, to be able to have such an effect on such an incredible woman, and also sad to think that the reason she’s blushing is possibly that no one has ever paid her such a sincere compliment before. Of all the injustices in the world, this is one Shaw can’t abide.

“Yeah,” Raven replies after a moment, and Shaw’s grin grows. “I think I’d like that.”

“Well, then,” Shaw looks away from her at the firelight dancing on the rock walls around them. He raises one of her hands in his and returns his gaze to hers, pressing his lips to her knuckles in a chaste kiss. “This isn’t a bad place to start.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure loads of people have already written fluff for them, but I needed to write some because they're so. damn. cute. And Shaw is a damn softie and I love him, and he loves Raven (who I also love) Eternal thanks to Ets for the edit!
> 
> Hit me up [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com), if you want. And thanks in advance for commenting/reading/leaving kudos! <3


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